In this episode, Richard Pater speaks with veteran journalist and Middle East expert Henrique Cymerman about his extraordinary 12-year relationship with Pope Francis. They discuss Cymerman’s unique role as an emissary between the Vatican and the Middle East, including organising the Pope’s historic visit to Israel, brokering interfaith peace initiatives, and advocating for Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Henrique Cymerman is a multi-award-winning journalist, fluent in five languages, with over 30 years’ experience covering the Middle East. He is also President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry between Israel and the Gulf States and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at the initiative of Pope Francis.
Transcript
(This transcript has been automatically generated by AI — please excuse any potential errors.)
Richard Pater:
Hello and welcome to the BICOM’s podcast. I’m Richard Pater, the director of BICOM. And today is the 29th of April. My guest today is Henrique Cymerman who is one of the legends of the foreign press corps here in row, having reported on regional issues for over 30 years and in five languages as well as being an award-winning journalist.
He is also the recipient of the highest honours in both Portugal, his native country, and in Spain as the Grand Commodore. He is also. He holds a variety of titles. He is also the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry between Israel and the Gulf States. And perhaps we’ll come on to that later. But first of all, Henrique, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Henrique Cymerman:
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you, Richard.
Richard Pater:
And for our audience, the real reason why I want to invite Henrique on today is that I actually caught an interview, a piece on Israeli media, and was fascinated to learn that he’d served as the special envoy to the late Pope. So perhaps I could start asking you about this, and you can tell us how you first met the Pope.
Henrique Cymerman:
Well, actually, Richard, I had many surprises in my career, but this one, I think, was the greatest. I was in the tour de. I give lots of lectures. I am teaching in Reichman University, and I give many lectures around the world, and I was in the middle of a tour in 2014. Well, 2013. Sorry. And, and somebody came to me who looked like a religious Jew.
He was a rabbi, Rabbi Abraham Skywalker, after a lecture and he said, look, my friend who was the cardinal of Buenos Aires became the pope, and he would like to meet you. And I thought it was a joke at the beginning. So, I said, sorry, can you repeat? I was jetlagged, so I thought maybe I didn’t hear properly, but,
But he said, repeated, and he said, it’s very serious. He used to follow you on TV. In the Spanish channel. I used to broadcast antenna address and, which is quite watched in Argentina. So, he said to me and, and he sees you as an authority on Middle Eastern affairs, and he wants to send a message to the Jewish people and to Israel.
So, he wants to invite you to the Vatican. Well, I was quite, you know, doubting at the beginning. But then I went to his office and suddenly I have a voice of someone on my phone, saying, Mr. Zimmerman, I feel I know you. I’ve been watching you for 20 odd years, and, and registering your stories.
When I couldn’t watch them live, and, And I would like to meet you and to send you a message so that was so in shock. I told him, sir, you’re the pope. He said, yes, I’m Pope Francis. So, I said, are you sure? I mean, how are you? The pope? So, he laughed, and he said, yes, I, I was surprised too.
He said I was not supposed to become the Pope, but it happened three months ago. And, and it’s important. So, I said, can I bring a cap, a TV camera? He said, look, I’m new here. I must check. And I said to myself, well, that’s it. I mean, it was a good joke and that’s it. And then the day after I was in Uruguay, already in Montevideo, and I get a message from the rabbi saying, it’s okay, you can bring a camera for the first time in history.
So, I came, and it was quite remarkable. It was a visit of a five hours visit to Santa Marta, the place where the Pope used to leave. He didn’t want to leave in the in the Pope’s residence, which was, you know, he said, if I’m alone in 500m², I will need a psychiatrist, because I need people with me.
So, he decided to stay in Santa Marta, which is a kind of hotel, I would say, for, priests. And he wanted to be with people. We had lunch that day together, and that’s to lunch. And after he spoke to my camera together with Rabbi Abram Skorka, he’s really good friend. He said, no, that’s it. No cameras.
I want to speak with you. And we spoke for 1.5 hour. And his first question was, what can I do for Israel and for the Middle East? And, you know, I was quite in shock with that question. And I said, okay, come. That should be your first visit as pope. And he said, would you help me? I said, you don’t need my help.
You have here the whole career. They say the government of the Vatican. You have everything. You don’t need me. But if you want, I will. He said: “No, no, no, you don’t understand. If I depend on them, it will take a long time. I know that you deliver”. So, I count on you. And on the rabbi. On. On.
Avi. He calls him Abraham’s Skorka. So, I came back to Israel, and I couldn’t imagine that two days afterwards, he would call me for the first time by phone directly. He dialled it and he said, oh, sorry, Papa Francisco, I’m Papa Francisco, and I thought it was an Argentinian friend just making a joke, because in Israel it was published already.
So, I said to him, yes, and I’m Napoleon and it was Papa Francisco. So, he laughed. And since then, I think we’ve been doing many, many things in the last meeting, six, seven times a year. And in the last three years we met every single month, once a month.
Richard Pater:
So how did that first visit happen?
Henrique Cymerman:
Sure, we I, I help. What was his experience in Israel exactly. Exactly. I he asked me to join him. So, I came to the Vatican, and I joined him in the Alitalia plane. We went first of all to Jordan, then to Bethlehem. And then we came to Israel. And I was with him all the time. I helped to organize it.
It was quite tough because the Vatican people didn’t want him to visit Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. And he said to me, you organize it, and I’ll come. And he came and he met Holocaust survivors. You know, he was very sensitive to anti-Semitism, to the Holocaust. In his last speech last week that he wrote, one of the main points was exactly that, the fight against anti-Semitism.
He used to say in, in many, many meetings we had, you know, for hours, I remember the king of Spain telling me very proud, Philippe, who is a very nice person who used to who said to me, I met your friend for 12 minutes. And that was like a big achievement. And I was ashamed to tell him that every time I meet him, it’s between 90 minutes and 2 hours.
In Santa Marta. We are, and we speak about everything with a lot of time. That’s what happened in the last year. So then, during the visit, he wanted to have also a prayer for peace with the Shimon Peres, who was the president, the ninth president of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, who is still the Palestinian president. He wanted to have a prayer for peace here in Notre-Dame in Jerusalem.
But I convinced Peres easily. I even convinced Netanyahu was also the prime minister in 2014 to pray for peace. No. Sorry. 13 and, no. Sorry 14. Exactly. And he was, really looking forward to seeing this prayer in Jerusalem. It was not possible. Possible because Abu Mazen didn’t accept. But finally, I convinced. I went to Ramallah to the Mukhtar, and I convinced them to do it in the Vatican two weeks after the, the visit.
And it was quite a surrealistic event, I must tell you today to think about a prayer for peace with the two presidents together and plenty of international personalities. It looks like science fiction, but I’ll tell you something that was not published. One of our plans for the end of 2025 was having a second event of this kind, but this time with more political angle too not only religious, having like 70, 80 leaders from all over the world, and the Arab world and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, many Arab countries too, and for sure, the Israeli leadership, in the Vatican that was planned for this year. And he asked me to help him to organize it. Wow. So, you’ve had so much a kind of time.
I mean, unprecedented perhaps, kind of for an Israeli to have such a, a close connection with, with the Pope. What was what was the content of those conversations that you can that you can tell us what was his main focus and interest when it came to Israel? I think we had two levels, three, maybe one was Middle Eastern affairs.
I went many times to Saudi Arabia, mainly to Riyadh, as an emissary of, of the pope. But everybody knew I’m Israeli and Jewish and I think I had here a double a double job in, in Saudi Arabia, you know, there are no diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and the Vatican, the Holy See. So, we were also helping, me and an Israeli, Middle Eastern expert.
Doctor. Narrator. Fair. We were both of us together there many times. By the way, she was there last week, too, and, and I was helping the pope in many matters related with the Middle East. Also, with Muhammad bin Zayed, the president of the UAE, which is a very important country for the future of the Middle East and the Abraham Accords.
But then we had the international level geopolitics. He thought her I could help him to understand many things, by the way, he was very, very active, on the hostages’ issue, too. I brought him five delegations of, relatives and of hostages. He called me by phone a week after the Hamas massacre, and he said to me that, he thinks he has friends among the victims and among the kidnaped people in southern Israel.
That was true. He had friends. I brought him some of these, the children of his friends. And, well, amazing stories is that when they when they will be more will be revealed. But anyway, the pope, the first delegation I remember him crying with tears in his eyes, without being able to speak. And then he asked me and needed to fear to stay after the event and, he went to meet, Palestinian delegation from Gaza.
And he came back, and we came back and in front of us, he called, the president of the United States. Then he called the emir of Qatar and then the president of Egypt, and he told him how important and vital is for the world and for him to release the hostages. And he was deeply involved in this matter.
By the way, you remember this yellow symbol icon of the, the hostages. He had one in his pocket all the time in the last month.
Richard Pater:
Wow, wow. And he also, you understand, he gave you also some other special positions and, and honours if you could tell us about that as well.
Henrique Cymerman:
Well, it was, it was, you know, after the, the prayer for peace, he felt like a kind of gratitude and he and we went, my crew and me to again, to Santa Marta, to the Vatican to meet him.
I didn’t know exactly what was supposed to happen. I was dreaming about an interview, but I knew that never happened before. A kind of real interview with the Pope, with the secular, media outlet. So, I said, okay, we come, and we’ll see what happens. And then they said to me, and that was unprecedented for me, that the Pope wants to see me alone in his apartment.
So, they took me to his living room in his small and humble apartment in Santa Marta. And, he said to me, Enrico, thank you very much for everything you did, both in my visit to the Holy Land and especially in the pray for peace, which is something I will never forget. And then he said, for me, you were the angel of peace.
I thought it was like his typical joke because he had the sense of humour. You know, Latin. He’s Argentinian. So, I thought he was joking. And I said, but, Papa Francisco, I don’t have wings. And he said, you’ll have them one day. And since then, he gave me like, a decoration which I have here in my in my living room at home in Tel Aviv and, and all the times in our joke when I came back, all our meetings in the last three years.
Not before. Until then, it was in one of the places there, one of the living rooms in Santa Marta. But, in the last, since January 2023, all my meetings with him, many of them with little fear, were in his living room, in his in his small apartment, which was like, three stars hotel in Europe, of the 70s.
It looked like that very, very modest. And we used to sit there and have long conversations about all of these matters. Me the least. Hostages recently and also geopolitics. He was also very concerned with the situation with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. And he was also involved then, but he was involved in many things over, you know, during the years, for instance, something I’m not sure that people know.
He was the one who did the agreement between Cuba and the United States with President Obama. And I know I think today I can already say that Raul Castro, the president of Cuba, was also in Santa Marta in his apartment to close this deal. And that was done by the book. So, I think he was involved in many, many matters.
He didn’t want those things to be public with me. He was so open because he said to me, unless I ask you specifically, everything we speak, you use your common sense, but everything we speak, you can publish it. So, it was quite amazing.
Richard Pater:
It is absolutely amazing. And I know you’re also very modest, but he also put you up for a, for a bigger award as well.
Henrique Cymerman:
Yes. And he didn’t tell me about that. I heard it from other people. From other people who won the Nobel Prize. Peace. Nobel Prize. I was a candidate, because of my working to pray for peace. And, and it was Pope Francis who presented, who presented me. He didn’t tell me that. But one day a year and a half afterwards, his secretary, who was a priest, Johannes, an Egyptian, a Copt, and who helped me a lot organizing the prayer for peace, told me, you know, one day he said, you know, he presents to you for the Nobel Prize.
I said, So that’s true. And he said, yes. Yes. He didn’t want you to know because he didn’t want you to be very arrogant because of that, very proud of yourself. But he did it. And by the way, some months ago, I think now. Well, no, it was not the last one. It was the one before.
I think it was like three months ago. He said that he intended to do it again this year, but this time, together with Nirit Ofir, who is a humanitarian activist in the Middle East Israeli. But he admired very much her work all around the Middle East, and he wanted to give her a kind of reward. I’m not sure he had time to do it until now. But it’s not so important. His intention is, for me, the most important thing.
Richard Pater:
Absolutely. And just tell me, in the last few interactions that you had with him over the last six months or so, obviously Israel is still kind of in the centre of a very difficult war, particularly in Gaza. How did how did the war in Gaza affect your relationship in his attitude towards Israel?
Henrique Cymerman:
Look, it was tough. It was very tough because I’ve been working with him for 12 years. So, you can imagine I had I don’t want to exaggerate, but hundreds of hours. And I got from him almost 100 meals that were written by him and, with his handwriting, which is very typical small letters. And, and one day I asked him why do you make this effort?
Why do you write for yourself? So, he said to me, because I want you, Enrique, to know that’s me, and that’s not someone else. You know, the Vatican is not an easy place. And he knew that. And he said it openly very, very often to me. He said, well, you know, it’s tough here. And they are not happy always, you know, insinuating that a Jew like me and a Jewish lady like Nirit Ofir are maybe the closest people.
Those somebody said he’s one of his new secretaries said to me, the Cardinals, when they meet the Pope, they meet him for two, three minutes, and you stay for 1.5 hour. Two hours. You. It’s really special, they said. And I felt a kind of criticism. And I asked the Pope, he said, look, you’re not Christian, you’re Jewish.
And you meet me a lot because I want you to meet me. So it was, you know, it was delicate, this thing, this situation. But I feel that we had the chance and the privilege to do many, many things until the beginning of the war. He said to me one week after the massacre, these guys, meaning Hamas, they took us backwards 50 years.
And he said, and everything is registered, by the way, he allowed me to if you want, I can send you the video. He said, I’m very close to you, and I know they killed people, and I know in the south of Israel that I have friends among them. So, then I asked him if he wants me to take a delegation to him.
He said yes. And then I said to him, it was quite prophetic. And it’s really, it’s registered. I told him, I’m afraid that no civilians in Gaza will pay the price because they are kidnaped by Hamas. And that’s exactly what happened. And time flies. And there are there is a group of 600 Christians that are concentrated in church.
And the Pope speaks with them every evening until Saturday night. He died Monday, Saturday evening. He still spoke with them, by the way, he did two things Saturday evening. Sunday. He already felt very, very, very bad. I know he was in the Saint Peter’s Square for a while. He didn’t smile. He was. I saw the pictures. He was not the same that I knew.
But Saturday evening he did two things. He sent me his last mail. Who was not with his handwriting. It was written by his secretary, Father Juan Cruz. But then he called Gaza, and it was his last call to Gaza. And he was very impressed with the situation of the civilians in Gaza. So, there were one day he said to me, you know, you’re the only contact I have with Israel.
I said, how come? I mean, Israel is so important for you, the Jewish people is so important for you. He said, yeah, but that’s the situation now. We should try to find a solution. So, I proposed to him to bring President Isaac Herzog the president of Israel. He said immediately. Yes, we organized a visit, and the visit was supposed to be 24 hours before he went to the hospital.
And we needed to delay and then to cancel the visit, unfortunately. Anyway, there were all kind of articles saying that he spoke about the genocide in Gaza, and I felt me and Miri, we felt we need to tell him openly what our opinion is. And I ask him for his permission to speak openly.
And he said, 12 years together, I want you to be sincere. So, I said, Pope Francis genocide is what my family leaved in Eastern Europe 80 years ago. Not the situation in Gaza. In Gaza there is a tragedy, a human tragedy, because Hamas succeeded doing exactly what they wanted to do to bring Israel in. And they knew that would happen because it’s impossible to fight in a place like Gaza.
We the population density we have in Gaza without civilian casualties, it’s impossible. It never happened. It would never happen. I was in Iraq, in Mosul, covering the war against Daesh, against the Islamic State. And the situation of Mosul is different of Gaza. And there were lots of civilians that paid the price, like in Gaza. So, he said to me, but, you know, I didn’t use the word genocide.
I said, look, I can tell you, I can quote the media, not one newspaper. Many places around the world said you spoke about the genocide; said no. I was asked if there is a genocide in Gaza. And I said, the countries of the world and the experts should decide if there is a genocide or not. I not available to do it to say that.
Then there was the Christmas event of Bethlehem. Mayor organized the kind of event in Santa Marta, and there was a display of all the Christian symbols, and there was a keffiyeh there, a Palestinian keffiyeh. And there was quite a scandal because of that. And when the Pope understood there was a keffiyeh at the beginning, he didn’t.
That’s what he said to me. He said immediately remove it, and it was removed. There were lots of moments like these. I think he’s even. Some of his Jewish friends were very cross with him, and he was very sorry of that. It was like painful for him. And it was in the last months of his life and unfortunately, I felt the obligation to tell him the truth and not to be diplomatic with him.
And I think at least we did it. And even in that so tough moment of it was the only time, I think, in these 12 years I had a kind of, disagreement, deep disagreement with him, that he invited us every four weeks to come and to have long conversations with him, and also to plan things for, this year, for 2025.
Richard Pater:
Thank you, that takes me on nicely to kind of to ask what the future is now, kind of now that we’ve, we’ve lost this, the Pope is no longer with us, for you as his emissary and his angel of peace as he as he called you. What does what do the future hold and what do you how do you campaign now? On that same kind of on those same principles?
Henrique Cymerman:
Look, we are doing some things that he asked us to do. We are creating, a foundation education for peace, led by Doctor Nirit Ofir. And I’m helping her there. She already has, lots of, I don’t want to go into details not to endanger those activities, but in countries that you can’t imagine.
The Pope knew all the details, and he was following them. There are schools, created by an Israeli that, who is the granddaughter of, Holocaust survivors and, and she, she’s doing an incredible job. And that was motivated and pushed by the Pope himself. We are going to continue and to enlarge the activity as much as we can.
And we are also waiting for the conclave to know who is going to be the next pope and to see what we can do. But if you ask me, and I need to tell you my feeling, I don’t think we’ll ever have someone who is like Francis at least not like him. He was really dedicated his life to the inter-religious dialog with Jews, with Muslim.
He was very respected in the Muslim world. You can’t imagine both in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, in Bahrain. He was in Indonesia recently. Recently, and he the biggest Muslim country in the world. He was respected by the Muslim as he was respected by Jews, even if because of the war. Now in Israel there is a sector that sees him as an enemy.
I think it’s a huge mistake. Some people in Israel have the tendency to, to try to transform because of the painful things that happened to Israelis in the last year and a half. They have they can make huge mistakes, like transforming good friends of Israel and of the Jewish people like Pope Francis into the enemies or into, I would say, not friends like before.
And that’s a huge mistake. We must be very careful. And even we when we have a gap, even when you have some differences in the way we see things, we must keep this friendship and the doors open. I myself, I must tell you, I believe it was a huge mistake not sending someone high level like President Herzog to the funeral of the Pope.
I told it publicly here in Israel, and I tell you too abroad. I have only one discourse. I think it was a huge mistake, and I hope we’ll find a way to repair it in the future.
Richard Pater:
Absolutely. So can I just I just a couple more questions before I let you go. First of all, your role as the head of the Chamber of commerce between Israel and the Gulf states, what is what is that involved, kind of and how optimistic are you about the expansion and the deepening of the Abraham Accords in 2020?
Henrique Cymerman:
I was in Saudi Arabia for the first time, and when I came back, I decided to fund this, this, Chamber of Commerce, because they told me something quite amazing. They said, look, if we want to in the future to have a strong tree, which is the relations between our countries, we can’t have only cooperation in the field of defence or intelligence like you have you with the Palestinians or with Jordan.
We need more fields like commerce, like innovation, like technology, like academic cooperation, culture, sport, etc. so we can have a very strong tree for the future. So, I came back, and I decided to create this chamber with that group of people, thinking that we can deal with everything, not with security, not with defence. That’s not our role, but with all the other aspects.
Then we had, coronavirus and then we had this war, which is the longest ever in Israeli history. But I must tell you that in the last two years, I’ve been five more times in, in Saudi Arabia. Nirit Ofir was there last week. And my feeling is that they took a strategic decision. They want relations with Israel, and that’s part of the vision 2030.
I believe there will be a critical moment now in May, during the visit of President Trump. They are working very hard to get it. But I think that only after the visit of President Trump, Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince, who is the king de facto of, Saudi Arabia will be for decades probably the king of Saudi Arabia.
He will decide finally if he will do it with this government or if he will wait for the next government. That’s I think, now the crossroads that we are in, MBS will decide after Trump’s visit if he wants it now, in the next year, like yesterday, the minister, Ron Dermer, said, or if he will wait for the next government.
And I hope because we know how circumstances can change in the Middle East, you know, in September 2023, September 7th, one month before the massacre, I was in Saudi Arabia in a delegation led by Nirit Ofir and other 12 Israelis, businessmen, in the conference of the Saudi government, the very high-level people. And we were like, we the label, it was written Israel.
And we were like, you know, people were looking at us like, wow, it was E.T. just landed in Saudi Arabia. It was really strange for them to see Israelis openly. And then they asked me to write an article when I come back to Israel. And I wrote in Yediot Aharonot, the main newspaper, first front-page Friday, you know, the most important day.
And we had two pages, big pages, telling all the story. What happened, the relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia were around the corner one month before the massacre. And I believe one of the main goals of the Hamas attack, the most important since the beginning of Zionism, was that, killing, the possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, because they knew that those relations, the significance of those relations is opening relations with other Muslim countries like Oman, Kuwait, Indonesia, Malaysia, maybe Pakistan.
So, they wanted to stop the process, that process in the same way they did in the 90s with the suicide bombing attacks, to start to stop the possibility of creating a Palestinian state, a secular Palestinian state, because that was what it was about the Oslo agreements. And they stopped it with the suicide bombing. I remember Rabin, the Prime Minister, asking Lama Shove, why now in the place where they were burning busses?
So now they did the same thing. But this time the goal was stopping relations with the most important country of the Muslim world, which is almost 2 billion people, a quarter of humanity. And the, the, the reaction I have in Saudi Arabia, one it since the second visit until now is no, they will not succeed. They postponed the decision, but we’ll get there.
And we need you, Israel, to help us to sell this agreement to the Muslim world, because we are the guards, they say, of Mecca and Medina. We have a moral, religious role which is vital for the Muslim world. So, we need to explain why we do it now. This normalization with Israel helps us. And the Palestinian issue is part of it.
But I don’t think they are expecting Israel to recognise a Palestinian state. Now. They want a kind of roadmap for the future.
Richard Pater:
And just one last question. Kind of looking inside Israel tonight is, is Memorial Day. And then there’s a very sharp, switch tomorrow night two in Independence Day. But in the background of all of this, still the, the hostages that remain captive in Gaza, do you have any do you have any sense?
First of all, in terms of the hostages’ deal, where you have any optimism that, that can be reached, an agreement and your overall assessment kind of, there’s a big question to end with. On Israeli society, as we mark these two kinds of foundational days of the, marking the establishment where you take the pulse of Israeli society, where you feel it’s at right now?
Henrique Cymerman:
You know, hostages, it’s something vital for the Israeli society, even if the government, the government wants to be sure that Hamas will disappear before that, Hamas will not be there anymore.
Hamas, I think, understood already they are not going to, lead Gaza or to be part of any kind of government in the future. They understand they lost their role after October 7th, but they are fighting not to lose their weapons because they know the moment they don’t have weapons, probably they will be killed and that both the Arab world, by the way, the Arab League and Israel and the United States don’t want to see Hamas as the new Hezbollah in Gaza.
They want them to go out and to leave Gaza. And that’s the real fight. And the hostages are in the middle. We have the obligation to release as much hostages as we can to solve this problem, even if that means postponing the solution to of defeating Hamas. Finally, I can tell you that the Saudis and the Egyptian don’t want to see Hamas in Gaza.
Be sure of that. For them, it’s a threat. The Muslim brothers are a threat. Look what Jordan is doing now in in Jordan, trying to, attack everything that is related with the Muslim Brotherhood in, in Jordan. Or look, even the Syrian president who has in the past a day said Islamic State member leader, he’s now asking to join the Abraham Accords.
Everything is changing, Richard, and sometimes we are so concentrated in the tree that we don’t see what we have around. We don’t see we have many, many other trees and many other things are happening here at the same time about Israeli society. It’s really bizarre. It’s one of the shocking things that the Memorial Day is immediately connected with the joy of independence, 77 years.
But that’s part of Judaism. You know me, I go on this theme from mourning to joy. That’s Judaism. And, and I think that when we tomorrow evening will celebrate the independence, we will remember the price we paid for this independence we are paying not only paid, but we are also paying every single moment we are talking. I know about young soldiers that are going to be after the Independence Day who are being removed from other places in the country to Gaza now.
So, we still are going to pay a price there, and that’s very painful. But at the same time, if we speak about Israeli society, I can tell you that the main good news, I can tell you is that the resilience of this society is unique. I don’t think there are there is any other society in the world, and I have like a very international background.
I know many countries; I visit many countries. I never saw a resilience like the one I see here. And even if there is a huge discussion, sometimes you have the feeling that Jews like to discuss, like to like polemics. Some people say that the destruction of Israel will come. The enemies of Israel say Iran, for instance, that we are not going to pass the 1880s anniversary.
That’s in three years. No, because we are in the kind of civil war like we’ve been in the time of David and Solomon or in the Hasmonean time that that destroyed the kingdom of, of the Jewish people. They say that’s exactly what’s going to happen. So, I’m very happy to disappoint them and to tell them Israel will continue.
Israel will be here forever. But again, it’s important to avoid these shocks, these frictions inside society especially. We can’t go back to October, October 66th. We must learn from October 7th. And these were in the society best must be united and must also think about peace agreements. I say to my kids, and I finish with this Richard with one hand.
Israel probably in the next generations. To survive we will need to go on fighting. But at the same time, we the other. We need to create coalitions with our neighbours to be here and to be stronger.
Richard Pater:
Henrique, thank you so much for everything you shared with us. Absolutely fascinating to listen to. And we wish you only, only future success.
Henrique Cymerman:
Thank you very much, Richard. All the best to you, too.
